5 reasons to use EGerrit - #2, Compare against workspace

To celebrate the release of EGerrit 1.1, we are enumerating the top 5 features of the tool.

Reason #2, Compare against workspace.

When you’ve authored a review and are receiving feedback, your next duty is to take this feedback into account. In order to make that as simple as possible, the compare editor offers the ability to show on one side the patchset that contains the comments, and on the other the files from the workspace in which you can directly code your changes (see picture).

Taking comments into account.

How to make that work?

• Download the review (so the most recent revision is now in your workspace);
• open the compare editor;
• and set the revision with comments on the left side of the compare editor and the workspace on the right side.

Now, as you are going through the comments, you can directly take them into account without even going back to a full blown editor. Pretty slick isn’t it?

Comparing a patchset to the files in the workspace has additional benefits:

• Gauge the impact of an incoming review on your on-going work. Let’s say that while you are working on a new feature, someone publishes a new review touching some of the files you are modifying. Using the compare with workspace feature, you can quickly see if and how the changes in the new review overlaps with your on-going work;
• Measure the impact of an additional change you would like to do on the current review. Let’s imagine that you would like to perform additional changes in the code under review, then you could simply start editing the code and then see how much extra changes it creates on top of the existing one.

You can download EGerrit from the Neon release repo or from the Eclipse Marketplace. For questions, you can connect with us on egerrit-dev@eclipse.org; and for bugs or to take a peek at the future you can see our Kanban board.